Urbanisation PDF - Discovering Political Ecology

CHAPTER 5 Urbanisation When the COVID-19 pandemic forced much of the world into lockdowns, the streets and the...

CHAPTER 5 Urbanisation When the COVID-19 pandemic forced much of the world into lockdowns, the streets and the public spaces of cities around the world appeared to empty of human life. The sound of cicadas, birds and foxes replaced the rumble of traffic, the roar of planes and the thrum of construction sites. In Uganda’s capital, Kampala, the main taxi park, through which 200,000 people are said to pass on a normal day, closed. In South Africa’s townships, bustling shebeens were forced to stop serving customers as curfews and a ban on the sale of alcohol came into force. Eerie ghost buses crawled the streets of London, carrying at most a handful of passengers. In response to the zoonotic virus (a virus that spreads from animals to humans, that is), the flows of people, resources and commodities that make cities so distinctive slowed or stopped (Gandy 2022a). The form and function of urban centres fundamentally altered. Around the same time, some people hailed an “Anthropause”, hoping that this period could mark a new relationship between humans and their environments. Others spoke of “nature” making a comeback, one that hubristic humanity had visited on itself. Some even spoke of nature’s revenge. City life did gradually return to a form of normality albeit with some important changes. Commuter patterns changed in many cities with staggered working weeks. Some employers facilitated working-from-home arrangements. Alcohol sales in South Africa resumed although with further bans. Both airlines and public transport struggled to cope with the huge fluctuations in demand between 2020 and 2022. In Uganda, while the Kampala taxi park reopened, major new restrictions imposed on the drivers meant that few, at first, found it possible to operate. This dramatic reconfiguration of city life draws attention to one of the most important Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. points political ecologists make about a world that is rapidly urbanising: cities are much more than a collection of buildings, towns with cathedrals or places with populations over a cer- tain size. They are defined by relationships, flows and practices and express ideas about how humans relate to their environments. Cities can be sources of hope or despair, just as they can be visions of the future or dystopian representations of humanity’s destruction of nature. Given such a processual perspective, it is perhaps unsurprising that political ecologists often avoid simple, rigid definitions of “cityness”. Some of the best research focuses not on the city as a thing but on the process of urbanisation that gives rise to the form of a city (Harvey 1996a). When analysing a place like Kampala, political ecologists are less likely to attend to the city as an architectural artefact and more likely to focus on the taxi journeys and the flows of water, energy, alcohol, waste and sewage that give rise to urban form. Indeed, to see the city as a set DOI: 10.4324/9781003095521-5 Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 81 of socio-ecological processes is to focus on the social relations, the technological mixes, the institutions and the ideas out of which “a city” appears. In this chapter, we introduce urbanisation as a key concept in political ecology. In doing so, we place particular emphasis on the city as a distinct environment that is the product of historically and geographically specific socio-ecological processes. In what is perhaps one of the most cited maxims among urban political ecologists, this approach implies that “in a fun- damental sense, there is nothing unnatural about New York City” (Harvey 1996b: 186, original emphasis). Just as a bird’s nest, the Birds Nest Stadium in Beijing, a parking lot in Jerusalem, a hedgerow or a field system are configurations of the human and nonhuman, so on a larger scale than the stadium or the parking lot, the cities they are a part of can be understood to be the same. The challenge is to understand how specific socio-ecological processes manifest in urban environments in ways that benefit some and not others. Cities are environments in which different social groups may thrive or barely survive, just as they are habitats in which nonhuman lifeforms will flourish or die. Today, one in eight humans live in no more than 33 cities—from Tokyo to Lima—and the United Nations (2019: 1) projects that two-thirds of the world’s population will be urban in 2050. At a time of a global environmental crisis driven by urban consumption, urbanisation and the enabling conditions of more just sustainable cities need to be at the centre of attention. URBAN METABOLISMS Just like cities, bodies are remarkable things. Bodies quietly undertake a series of chemical reac- tions that convert food into movement, creativity, heat and waste (Chapter 7). Drawing from the Greek word for “change”, these chemical reactions—and the broader process—is referred to as metabolic. Karl Marx (1976: 283) takes the same word (albeit in German, Stoffwechsel) to capture the complex relationship between humans and their environments. It makes some sense to refer to human-environment relations as metabolic: the term provides a challenge to dualistic nature-society approaches and instead suggests a co-determining relationship. It is perhaps unsurprising that many different approaches to the environment—both Marxist and more mainstream—have taken metabolism as the basis for thinking about how human-environment relations capture the processes of urbanisation. Contemplating these different uses of “metabolism”, Joshua Newell and Joshua Cousins (2015) identify three Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. overarching approaches to urban metabolism that have developed in recent years: Marxist ecologies, industrial ecology and urban ecology. They place urban political ecology under the broader category of “Marxist ecologies”, given its explicit focus on the production and reproduction of social inequality. Thus, studies of urban metabolism have focused on the uneven outcomes resulting from flows of water (Swyngedouw 2004), food (Heynen 2006), fat (Marvin and Medd 2006), alcohol (Lawhon 2013) and energy (Luque-Ayala and Silver 2016). An important collection of essays on urban political ecology (Heynen et al. 2006) goes so far as to propose “circulations and metabolisms” as the starting point for a political ecology of the city. A socio-ecological process, urban metabolism is one that depends on labour as its “living, form-giving fire” (Marx 1973: Notebook III/IV). You might remember Marx’s understanding Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  82 Urbanisation that humans have an active relationship with the environment from Chapter 2, transforming it through labour. To see this process in action, we might look to the remarkable rise of cities in the Gulf states. Indeed, as we write this book, the FIFA World Cup in Qatar 2022 has just been played. Already in the lead-up to it, the World Cup was an odd one: in the most blatant fashion it exposed the power relations involved in bidding for large sporting events, the lack of interest in player welfare among sports’ governing bodies and, above all, the abuse of migrant workers in the Gulf states. In May 2022, NGOs including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch addressed an open letter to Gianni Infantino, president of football’s international governing body FIFA, which drew attention to the fact that migrant workers from Africa and Asia make up about 95 per cent of the Qatari workforce. They comprise almost the entire workforce behind the construction of the stadiums and the servicing of infrastructure during the World Cup. The letter goes on to note that “The scale of human rights abuses linked to the World Cup is significant. Over the last 12 years, the vast majority of migrant workers in Qatar have had to ‘pay to work’ in the country, with substantial illegal recruitment fees to secure their jobs, and many thousands have been subjected to widespread wage theft” (HRW 2022). In the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, one of the most dramatic and rapid processes of urbanisation has reached its apogee in the city of Dubai. Remarkable land reclamation projects such as the Palm Jumeirah create a sense that a whole new city has emerged magically out of the sea. But as with Qatar, this apparent magic should not hide the fact that Dubai has been built through the labour of a heavily exploited migrant workforce, structured through the kafala employment and immigration system. As Michelle Buckley (2013: 259) writes: This [kafala] system forms a cornerstone of the autocratic state’s efforts to retain power through the maintenance of a small and politically acquiescent polis, in that it has played a key role in placing very explicit limits on the state’s responsibilities to non-citizen residents, while at the same time preserving the very generous entitlements—including free land, free education, subsidized energy, well-paying jobs and so on—afforded to the national citizenry. The migrant workforce in Dubai is “the form-giving fire” within the metabolic processes giving rise to the city. Whether the dizzying heights of the Burj Khalifa or the stunning fronds—vis- ible from space—of the Palm Jumeirah, cities rely on human labour transforming nonhuman Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. resources such as iron, sand, saltwater and oil into useful things. Cities are an outcome of meta- bolic processes that bring classed, racialised and gendered social groups into an active relation- ship with nonhuman resources. While humans have been reliant on this metabolic exchange for subsistence throughout history, the “production of nature” has begun to take a new form under capitalism (Chapter 4). As we see in the example of Dubai, cities have increasingly come to be produced as commodities—sometimes in a highly spectacular fashion, sometimes in more mundane forms. As commodities, nature and urban space are increasingly treated as abstract, fungible things. A square metre of real estate in Dubai can be exchanged for an equivalent commodity somewhere else, and rather than valuing the qualities and the work that goes into a specific lived urban environment, emphasis is increasingly placed on the exchange value of urban space and the ability to profit from it. Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 83 MEDIATING METABOLISM THROUGH URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE Uneven socio-ecological outcomes manifest in different ways in urban environments. One way to unpack these is to map the sprawl of urban infrastructural networks. In the South African city of Durban, for example, both water and sanitation infrastructures reflect the material legacies of apartheid with its separation of racialised groups in urban space. In Lahore, Pakistan, the levels of air pollution reflect the ways in which roads, as infrastructures for travelling, working and living, mediate urban inequalities. For several decades, environmental justice activists have drawn attention to the uneven exposure of racialised and caste-based social groups to environmental harms. As the scholar-activist Robert Bullard (1990) once demonstrated, toxic waste, air and lead pollution are all far more likely to affect communities of colour in the United States than other social groups. Moreover, in contrast to the exposure to environmental harms, a lack of access to environmental “goods”, such as green space, clean water and adequate sanitation, is equally an issue of environmental justice. While a lack of access to environmental goods is a problem that is particularly acute in some parts of the global south, it is a more significant issue than many might assume in rich countries of the world. “Plumbing poverty”, as Shiloh Deitz and Katie Meehan (2019) refer to the lack of access to piped water, is an important and pernicious marker of the classed and racialised landscapes of urban and suburban United States. Plumbing poverty is a clear example of how power relations manifest in the infrastructures that lie beneath our cities. Indeed, if urban metabolisms produce uneven outcomes, these are mediated by infrastructures that often are hidden from view. Beneath all cities lies a dense network of infrastructure without which the city would cease to function. In the Swedish city of Gothenburg, about 1,750 km of water pipes are installed below ground, bringing water to the city’s residents. If the pipes, which are made from grey cast iron and polythene, were put in a straight line, they would reach as far as Rome. However, while this is a “modern” infrastructural system in a city of the global north, about 20 per cent of all drinking water in the system leaks, which can leave households without water access until utility workers can locate the damage (Malm et al. 2015). Infrastructures such as Gothenburg’s and Durban’s water piping are the hidden conduits through which “circula- tion and metabolism”—the framing concepts for a political ecology of the city (Heynen et al. 2006)—are made possible. Water networks, sewerage pipes, electricity cables, gas tubes, petrol stations, phone lines and fibre-optic cables enable businesses to run, people to heat their homes, Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. just as they enable communication across space. It is fascinating to have this underworld revealed when construction workers dig a hole in the street, for example during road maintenance. As we have written this book, hole after hole has been appearing in the streets of London when the utility responsible for providing water across the city,  Thames Water, belatedly has been trying to plug leaks in the network.  These leaks have been exacerbated by (and of course exacerbate) the drought conditions brought on by an unusually hot summer—one of the many extreme weather events linked to climate change. Large holes have punctuated the streets of Gothenburg, too, to facilitate the construction of a much-delayed train tunnel under the central city. Peering into the city’s underbelly through these holes is to view a rich history of urbanisation and people’s changing relationships with Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  84 Urbanisation their broader environments. In Gothenburg, remarkably well-preserved wooden water pipes laid in the late eighteenth century were found below one street. Redundant infrastructures, made obsolescent by changes in technology, lie alongside fibreoptic cables, only recently installed to enable more rapid communications. If these infrastructural systems represent different moments in a process of urbanisation, they also speak of different historical visions of what the city might be (Figure 5.1). Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. FIGURE 5.1 Cross-section of Paris above and below ground, nineteenth century “Sewers enjoy a special place in the pantheon of urban mythology”, Matthew Gandy (1999: 24) writes of subterranean Paris. “They are one of the most intricate and multi-­ layered symbols and structures underlying the modern metropolis, and form a poignant point of reference for the complex labyrinth of connections that bind urban space into a coherent whole. … Just as sewers are repeatedly associated with dirt, danger and the unseen, they are also physical manifestations of new patterns of water usage, bodily hygiene and the progressive application of new advances in science and technology”. Photo by iStock.com/Nastasic Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 85 For Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (2000: 120), technological networks “are constitu- tive parts of the urban … the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place”. However, these urban infrastructures—appearing as they do as solid “things”—tend to obscure the labour and the social relations involved in urban metabolic processes, such as those embarked on through the kafala system in Dubai. Taking the example of water, Kaika and Swyngedouw show how technological artefacts, such as dams, water tow- ers and pumping stations, mask “the social relations through which the metabolic urbanization of water takes place” (121). While human products, technologies appear to do the work of humans (Figure 5.2). Kaika and Swyngedouw also detect something of a shift between the Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. FIGURE 5.2 Workers laying drainpipes in Santiago de Cuba In a study of the construction of urban infrastructure in Cuba around 1900, we learn that the “sewer job” in Santiago de Cuba was particularly nasty business. Captain Rockenbach of the United States 12th Cavalry, who oversaw the work done by Cuban workers, stated: “‘This was as difficult a piece of sewer work as could be found.’ Rainfall was unusually heavy in July, water poured constantly into 1000 feet of open trench from rotten pipes until eight feet of foul water stood there and the pipes from the gas company zigzagged across the trench” (Hitchman 1975: 354). Photo by iStock.com/ilbusca Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  86 Urbanisation “phantasmagoria” of an early modernity, when urban infrastructures were placed in plain view, in stunning architectural designs, to be celebrated for their remarkable achievements, and a high modernity during the twentieth century in which they have come to be buried—only visible through the holes we might occasionally be able to peer into. While masking social relations and mediating urban metabolisms, urban infrastructures bind people together through the sharing of natural resources. Deitz and Meehan’s (2019) research is an important corrective to more simplistic assumptions that all residents in cities of the global north always have access to universal service provision. Not everyone, by any means, has access to piped water and a plumbed toilet, even in a city like Gothenburg. Even so, infrastructure is often considered part of a social contract in which the state guarantees access to services in exchange for people agreeing to pay for those services, whether through taxation or user charges. This ostensible guarantee of service-provision-for-all expresses what some authors have referred to as “the modern infrastructural ideal” (Graham and Marvin 2001). An aspiration as much as an actual achievement, the modern infrastructural ideal expresses a normative vision of how cities should function and also how metabolic processes might produce more equal outcomes. Nevertheless, as Steve Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) note, by the 1960s, the mod- ern infrastructural ideal appeared to have run into trouble. This is the same period in which Matthew Gandy (2002) describes a “paranoid urbanism” beginning to develop in New York City. Coincidentally, concerns over water quality led many New Yorkers to turn to bottled water, while fiscal crises developed and investment in the maintenance of infrastructure fell to historic lows. A process of “splintering urbanism” therefore began to unfold: the modern infrastructural ideal splintered into a situation whereby some were being provided with environmental goods, and others were not. As a result, Karen Bakker (2004) describes the provision of water in many cities as occurring within “archipelagos”—interconnected islands of provision in a broader sea of unserviced locations. For urban political ecologists, the processes that produce these uneven outcomes—processes that ensure that some have access and others do not—have become the analytical focus of their work. With their thesis of splintering urbanism, Graham and Marvin make a bold universalising claim. But urban political ecologists have criticised their suggestion that splintering also has taken place in cities of the global south for the rather easy transference of a model developed in one part of the world (the global north) to another (the global south). Indeed, Olivier Coutard (2008: 1815) concludes that “one cannot speak of ‘splintering urbanism in general’—i.e., as a Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. global trend—in any meaningful analytical way”. His argument ties into a broader critique of urban studies suggesting that it must become less Eurocentric and more comparative (Roy and Ong 2011; Robinson 2016). Against the assumption that splintered provision has been a recent phenomenon in the global south, perhaps the emergence of serviced archipelagos has been the dominant trend rather than the exception for the majority world. Settler colonial contexts provide some evidence for such a claim. In South Africa, as noted, the uneven development of infrastructural networks mirrors the apartheid project’s vision of “separate development” for those of “separate races”. An informal settlement such as Inanda, on the outskirts of Durban, was therefore largely ignored by municipal planners until a cholera outbreak began to threaten the serviced settler-colonial population living nearby. At the same time, apartheid authorities stoked racial tensions in the area by blaming different racialised groups for the lack of adequate Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 87 infrastructure (Hughes 1996). Water and sanitation networks, then, both reflected and reinforced the legacies of apartheid. What should be clear from this discussion is that infrastructure often does more than simply provide a vessel through which resources flow. Infrastructure—just as the cities of which it is a part—is a projection of what a society would like to be. When political ecologists look at the infrastructures that lie beneath a city, they therefore tend to see much more than a black box: infrastructures perform functions that result in greater or lesser social and environmental justice. They bring a citizenry together or divide that citizenry. They ensure that people receive water for free or make sure that they pay. Crucially, the broader social and environmental relations within an urbanised society shape these technologically mediated functions, even as urban infrastructures express visions of what kind of socio-ecological relations a society might strive for in the future. EXTENDED URBANISATION In what is a brilliant example of this idea—that infrastructure embodies a history of ideas— Gandy (2002) charts the development of New York City’s water network. He periodises the changing fortunes of municipal service provision from the emergence of a civic realm in the 1800s to the heights of “municipal urbanism” in the 1900s, followed by a gradual decline as the twentieth century progressed. “The history of cities”, Gandy writes, “can be read as a his- tory of water” (22). This urban-water history is about a gradually expanding ecological frontier that extends ever deeper into New York State, eventually covering the largest catchment area anywhere in the United States. The water network—and the socio-ecological metabolism that comprises it—expanded from the urban population’s dependence on municipal wells to a network drawing from new reservoirs and storage facilities within the Croton Watershed in south-eastern New York State. As pressure came upon these supplies, the city further expanded its ecological hinterland to also include the Catskill/Delaware Watershed. The latter now accounts for 90 per cent of the water consumed within the city. Gandy’s political ecological history of New York draws attention to the fact that the boundary between city and country is a blurry one. While greenbelts, arterial roads and zip codes might suggest an outer edge, the city extends well beyond what we might think of as its physical form. Indeed, where does the city end? The urban is constituted out of rela- Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. tionships, circulations and metabolisms that continually stretch what we think of as a city. Focusing not on New York but Chicago, William Cronon (1992) therefore demonstrates how that city developed through its relations with a broader ecological hinterland. If the history of water cannot be separated from the history of cities (Gandy 2002), so Cronon demonstrates, Chicago’s growth was intimately bound up in the growth of the grain, timber and livestock industries. Commodities markets, futures markets and a whole category of “finance” also developed within Chicago as a result of its connections to the agricultural lands of “the Great West”. Thus, both Gandy’s and Cronon’s studies draw our attention to how the boundaries between city and country are blurred. “The city” is constituted out of its relations with other places and spaces, and while giving rise to cities, urbanisation also produces a rural hinterland supporting that urban centre. Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  88 Urbanisation The relational approach to urbanisation seen in both Gandy’s work and in Cronon’s comple- ments the process-based understanding of urban metabolisms we discussed earlier: the city can be defined by the relations it internalises and expresses. In his writings on urbanisation, David Harvey (1973) notes that space (the space of the city, for example) can be conceptualised in three main ways. Absolute space is the space of private property relations—it can be divided up, measured and owned. Think of the discussion of real estate in Dubai or, perhaps closer to home, the seminar room or library in which you might be reading this book. That space is presumably owned by a university able to claim it as private property. Relative space is that which has often interested transport geographers and those interested in locational analysis. It is the distance between two locations as measured in length but also in time. Again, think of the distance between where you are sitting and your home, or the place you might be going to have lunch. This distance matters when thinking about where to locate a train station, a toxic dump or a hospital. Relational space, by contrast, captures the ways in which a city—like Chicago, New York or Kampala—is defined by its relationships with places beyond what we think of as its borders. Relational space refers to the meanings invested in a place, the practices that give it a distinct identity and the specific technologies, relations to nature and institutions that shape its use. In the case of the room in which you may or may not be sitting, relational space is what gives it meaning as an educational space, and it is what makes a lecture theatre a lecture theatre and so on. Similar approaches have been adopted in other areas of political ecology, for example when it comes to a relational conception of an organism and its environment, human and nonhuman (Levins and Lewontin 1985). This work emphasises that in the flipside to Gandy’s and Cronon’s framing of New York and Chicago, the argument clearly also works the other way around: the most remote alpine meadow can be thought of as connected to—and partly constituted through—its relationship to cities. Radically extending the idea that there is no end to the city, Marcel Meili (2015) poses the following question: is the Matterhorn City? Meili’s rhetoric seems perverse given that the Matterhorn usually is taken to represent everything that is the opposite of the urban. And yet, if we think of the Swiss mountain as a product of its relations with other places, spaces and environments, it has at least as many connections to cities as it does to rural parts of Switzerland (Figure 5.3). Here is Meili: [Matterhorn’s] image stands for a mountain world that has taken over all possible urban functions, and its various simultaneous meanings have long since become entangled in conflicts that can no longer be resolved. Its image and its reality have moved close to or Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. right into the centers. Conversely, the mountain is scarcely used or experienced as anything other than an urban monument, an athletic playground, or a nature museum. (105) Christian Schmid (2013: 399) goes on to write that “Switzerland is today a completely urban- ized country with new urban landscapes that can no longer be apprehended with the classic understanding of the city”. This is a very radical claim. Meili and Schmid seem to be arguing that similar processes might be influencing Switzerland’s alpine landscapes as those influencing Kampala’s taxi rank. Indeed, the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile can also be thought of in similar terms, and Martín Arboleda (2020) is thereby able to trace out the many logistical networks giving rise to—and drawing from—mining interests in the desert. He shows how it Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 89 FIGURE 5.3 Is the Matterhorn city? The Gornergrat railway station, located at 3,089 m, is a terminus for trekkers wanting to explore the area around the Matterhorn, which is visible in the background. Photo by iStock.com/mbbirdy becomes impossible to think of the project of extracting resources from beneath one of the driest and most barren landscapes outside relations with other port cities, other infrastructural networks and other labouring bodies around the world. The mine in the Atacama Desert is both “urban” and “planetary”. Through lithium mining, it provides the resources necessary for modern battery production, which is intrinsic to smart cities, electric vehicles, mobile phone communications and the devices on which we have written this book (Chapter 7). While Arboleda’s is a deeply impressive account of the ways in which disparate ecologies Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. are produced in relation to one another, some are more sceptical of the broader approach to “planetary urbanisation”. They suggest that it represents a Eurocentric perspective, lacking analytical nuance and attention to situated processes of urbanisation (Derickson 2015). This is the same critique that the “world systems perspectives” we discussed in Chapter 3 have been exposed to. Meantime, others instead build on the thesis of planetary urbanisation to argue that urban political ecologists often have focused on the wrong things. As we also saw in Chapter 3, Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth (2015) detect a “methodological cityism” in studies that focus on “the city” at the expense of the relations that constitute that form. Why, they might ask, does Gandy begin his story of New York’s ecological frontier in New York City and not in the Croton Watershed? Why does Swyngedouw (2004) begin his story of the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil within the city limits? Alida Cantor (2021) discusses this point at length, and Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  90 Urbanisation for us, her discussion points to the importance of recognising how the analytical choices we make around scale come to shape our knowledge about the world. “[A]s discussion proliferates around a planetary turn”, as one of us has argued previously, “we need to keep the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the situated and the planetary, continually present within our analyses” (Loftus 2018: 93). The discussions around scale are also a helpful reminder of the need to remain focused on processes and relations rather than things. Urban political ecology, as Swyngedouw and Kaïka (2003) have it, is concerned with “the urbanization of nature” rather than “the nature of the city”. Crucially, this focus on process makes it possible to envision other cities and engage in practices for a more sustainable, different kind of urbanisation. CITIES OF THE FUTURE In the late 1990s, a team of artists and architects, including the Harvard School of Design and the “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas, became intensely interested in the West African megalopolis of Lagos. The Nigerian capital had often been portrayed in apocalyptic tones, not least in Robert Kaplan’s essay for The Atlantic on “The Coming Anarchy”, which in neo-Malthusian terms (Chapter 4) described an African continent disintegrating under the weight of population increase, environ- mental degradation and political breakdown. In contrast, and inspired by a new generation of Nigerian intellectuals, Koolhaas and colleagues sensed a city brimming with possibility in Lagos. In the words of the curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor, African megacities are “centres that still hold great potential for human vitality, creativity and inventiveness” (quoted in Gandy 2005: 37–38). Although much of the work that Koolhaas and his collaborators had planned never materialised—including a major publication on the city—proposals for a new bridge project, films and various enthusiastic essays serve as records of their unexpected embrace of the city. Reflecting on this period, Koolhaas states that he was inspired by a city in which the state “had withdrawn”. In spite of this withdrawal—or perhaps because of it—Koolhaas felt able to claim that Lagos “worked”. The planned book was thus provisionally titled Lagos: A City that Works. Although Koolhaas’ rather narrow reading of what does and does not work in Lagos (as well as his slightly idiosyncratic reading of why it does) was widely criticised (e.g. Gandy 2005), other critical scholars were also seeking to learn from the cities of Africa. In doing so, they too framed them as cities of the future rather than as dystopian failures, even as they did so through careful ethnographic research and thick descriptions of the livelihood struggles out of which Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. African urbanisation was constituted. This is clearly evident in AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) work, where he echoes some of the language used by Koolhaas. Of the African city, he writes: a wide range of provisional, highly fluid, yet coordinated and collective actions are being generated that run parallel to, yet intersect with, a growing proliferation of decentralized local authorities, small-scale enterprises, community associations, and civil society organiza- tions. These actions are, in turn, replete with locally generated moral and social economies, compelled, nevertheless, from a more expansive engagement with a broad range of external processes and actors. If African cities do, at some level, work, then I contend that these practices play a major role in making them work. (13) Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 91 As a whole, Simone’s book For the City yet to Come is a plea to better understand informal practices and collectives—to analyse their moral and social economies and to situate these within broader histories. Thus, it also starts pointing to what the city of the future might look like. Resonating with Simone’s argument, Ananya Roy (2011) upends conventional think- ing about megacities, which are cities with more than ten million inhabitants. In Mumbai, approximately 60 per cent of the population live in slums, and these areas, she notes, are often portrayed in dystopian, apocalyptic terms, as urban anomalies that need to be erased. Roy instead calls on scholars and policymakers to see the city from the perspective of the slum, without whose inhabitants’ labour the city would cease to function. If the slum is seen as “a terrain of habitation, livelihood and politics” (224), how might the experiences of slum dwellers be the starting point for a more just city? On the streets of Delhi, people in cars and cycle rickshaws compete for space. Rickshaws are not only an emissions-free mode of transport and are used more frequently by women and children than by men but also provide an income to some of the most marginalised people in the city. While India’s urban middle-classes often voice demands for environmental protection in rural areas, Amita Baviskar (2020: 131) notes that cars “are the big blind spot in the mirrors of [these] bourgeois environmentalists”. In spite of being one of the main contributing factors to Delhi’s toxic levels of air pollution, cars are seen as an unquestionable part of the urban landscape by a middle class that has sought to banish the cycle rickshaw. “Despite its obvious utility—economic, social and environmental”, Baviskar writes, “the cycle-rickshaw is seen as an embarrassment in a world-class city in the making. It does not fit into the modernist visions of judges, the bourgeoisie, the Delhi government, even though its proliferation attests to its eminent functionality” (130). So, how would an environmentalism of the migrant men who pull rickshaws, or the women and children who predominantly use them, transform the city? In a different context, Carl Death (2022) has recently found inspiration in the work of the AfricanFuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor to destabilise mainstream imaginaries of the future. Okorafor’s novel Who Fears Death (2010), he argues, can help to “imagine new forms of being and becoming in the context of climate change” (240). Just like existing African and Asian cities, AfricanFuturist imaginaries can, therefore, provide lessons for the socio-ecological worlds we might seek to construct. Such interest in “the city yet to come” has—of course—shaped planning debates for well over a century. Contributions to these debates have almost always presented visions of the kinds of relations that need to be established between the city and its environment (this is not least evident from Koolhaas’ Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. engagement with the deltaic city of Lagos). Crucially, visions of future cities are as much socio-ecological imaginings as they are urban ones. It is interesting to note, therefore, that these socio-ecological visions historically have tended to call for a new “balance” between the city and the countryside. One of the most important texts in the field of urban design is Ebenezer Howard’s (1898) Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Howard was appalled by the living conditions of the working classes in Britain, who often lived in slums where rivers served both as sewers and sources of drinking water—an infrastructural solution that contributed to a series of cholera pandemics during the nineteenth century. Howard instead presented a vision of a future city in which humans would live in harmony with the environment, finding a balance between the urban and the rural. His book presents an image of “three magnets” that seeks to capture the advantages and disadvantages of rural and urban life alike, Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  92 Urbanisation FIGURE 5.4 Örgryte trädgårdsstad (Örgryte Garden City), Gothenburg, Sweden The Garden City movement spread far outside Howard’s native England. It became a dom- inant urban planning ideal in Sweden in the 1910s and 1920s when Örgryte trädgårdsstad was built. In contrast to Howard’s ideal, Örgryte and other Swedish “garden cities” were built on a neighbourhood scale in already existing cities, and they were not designed to be self-sufficient in the manner Howard had intended. While Howard envisioned the working class to be living in “the Garden City of tomorrow”, Örgryte is today one of the areas with the highest real estate values in Gothenburg. Photo by Gustav Cederlöf and he then goes on to portray the many advantages of the “Town-country”—his own vision of the Garden City (Figure 5.4). Howard writes: Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. I will undertake, then, to show how in “Town-country” equal, nay better, opportunities of social intercourse may be enjoyed than are enjoyed in any crowded city, while yet the beauties of nature may encompass and enfold each dweller therein; how higher wages are compatible with reduced rents and rates; how abundant opportunities for employment and bright prospects of advancement may be secured for all; how capital may be attracted and wealth created; how the most admirable sanitary conditions may be ensured; how beautiful homes and gardens may be seen on every hand; how the bounds of freedom may be wid- ened, and yet all the best results of concert and co-operation gathered in by a happy people. (19) Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 93 While well-intentioned and no doubt progressive, Howard’s vision of the Garden City—and the relations with nature that might be established in it—rest on longstanding ideological conceptions of “nature”. We encountered these ideas, which rest on a fundamen- tal separation of nature and society, in Chapter 4. The ideological approach to nature can also be seen in the writings and designs of other influential urban planners of the twentieth century (see Swyngedouw and Kaïka 2003). It is present in the designs of Patrick Geddes and Frederick Law Olmsted, the urban planner and landscape architect who co-designed Central Park in New York. It can also be seen in the work of the influential architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose design for the Guggenheim Museum sits on the edge of Central Park, as well as in that of perhaps the most influential urban planner of the twentieth cen- tury, Le Corbusier. He was one of the key architects of the modernist movement, seeing standardisation and industrial production as the enabling forces of a modern, scientifically designed city. Intriguingly, beyond these past visions of the city and urban design (all, interestingly, pro- posed by white men), Swyngedouw and Kaïka (2003) suggest that similarly dualistic interpre- tations of nature and society have influenced ideas around “the sustainable city”. While some of the language used might be different, contemporary plans to build hugely ambitious new ecocities, such as Masdar in the United Arab Emirates, rest on a set of interpretations akin to Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s. Swyngedouw and Kaïka’s response to such an ideological con- ception is to instead articulate a vision of the city as constituted out of processes that blur the boundaries between the social and the ecological, the city and the countryside, understanding these as inseparable dimensions of the same process. “[V]iewing the city as a process of continu- ous, but contested, socioecological change”, they write, “which can be understood through the analysis of the circulation of socially and physically metabolized ‘nature,’ unlocks new arenas for thinking and acting on the city” (577). Debates on sustainable urbanisation have recently given rise to ideas around “smart cit- ies”. Smart cities supposedly bring together new digital technologies with progressive plan- ning and administration objectives to reduce carbon emissions and achieve new efficiencies (Kitchin et al. 2015). For example, “smart” electricity meters can monitor energy demand and production in real-time and, using price incentives, seek to change people’s consumption behaviours to follow a more efficient pattern (Bulkeley et al. 2016). These new technologies, therefore, assume a new role for urban residents as “citizen sensors” (Gabrys 2014) or “digi- tal care workers” (Burns and Andrucki 2021) responsible for achieving the new efficiencies Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. expected of them by urban planners. “Smart” applications are often also discussed in traffic- system management, where digital sensors can produce real-time data on public transport arrivals, departures and usage, thus enabling a more efficient synchronisation of travel patterns and potentially reducing carbon emissions. However, political ecologists have approached these developments by asking the who-question that is so central to the field (Chapter 1): who benefits from the smart city and who loses out? How might the socio-ecological flows that result from such technological, political and economic mixes help bring about better or worse socio-ecological futures, and for whom? The who-question puts the political economic interests involved in “smart” technologies in focus, just as it does issues of ownership, control and the right to the city. Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  94 Urbanisation A RIGHT TO THE CITY? In the late 1980s, several Brazilian cities began experimenting with what was termed “par- ticipatory budgeting”. This was a process that opened up questions of ownership and control in radical ways: participatory budgeting involves residents of a municipality actively making decisions on how resources should be allocated and how budgets might be spent. Rather than electing representatives to make decisions for them, citizens were to make those decisions directly. Although it might appear somewhat unglamorous to be deciding on street lighting, the maintenance of a playground or the location of a municipal dump, the principle behind such an approach to governance was that better decisions would be made if people were able to participate directly in the process. As can be seen from these examples, many such decisions are very clearly political ecological concerns over waste, environment and the use of public space. In the city of Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting came to be formalised within a three-stage process. Each stage represented a different scale of decision-making: neighbour- hood assemblies, thematic assemblies and citywide coordinating sessions. Perhaps surpris- ingly, the experiments undertaken by these left-wing Brazilian municipalities were widely praised by neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank. The initial plan, however, was very much the brainchild of activists within the left-wing Workers’ Party in Brazil (Partido dos Trabalhadores). As Raquel Rolnik (2013) demonstrates, the progressive vision behind partici- patory budgeting—which was later rolled out to more than 170 cities across Brazil—was a key influence on a set of policies known as the City Statute. The Workers’ Party signed the statute into federal law in 2001, and this was later interpreted in terms of it legislating for “the right to the city”. Rolnik and other critical planning scholars assert that the right to the city is about more than simply saying that people should have a right to abide in a city (although this is obvi- ously an important part of it). Crucially, the policies within the City Statute suggest that the right to the city is about asserting people’s right to participate in making the city—an idea that goes back to the central role of labour in the urban metabolism. Participatory budgeting, then, is one relatively modest way in which this process might start. In hindsight, the City Statute embodied somewhat contradictory visions. On the one hand, it legislated for people’s right to the city, while on the other, it also entailed a more market-led vision of urban entrepreneurial- Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. ism, which gave way to a spectacular social and environmental horror show like the 2016 Rio Olympics. Even so, it must be viewed as one of the more radically democratic approaches to city governance. In framing “the right to the city” as a cry for a more just city, it is crucial to acknowl- edge the Brazilian debates. In academic circles, however, the concept is most often associated with the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1996). For Lefebvre, the city is a produced space that embodies social relations; it expresses imaginaries and divisions of labour. The particular ways in which these relations, imaginaries and divisions come together are spe- cific to a given historical moment and a particular location. Thus, it is not difficult to see why urban political ecologists have claimed that a socio-ecological reading of the city is implied in Lefebvre’s work—one in which different future visions and different metabolic processes converge in a distinct form. As Farhana Sultana and others have pointed out, the right to the Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=7275982. Created from kcl on 2024-10-20 09:52:19.  Urbanisation 95 city has important implications for how we might think about the distribution of resources within the city. How can urbanised socio-ecological flows be organised in more democratic ways? For Sultana and Alex Loftus (2013), therefore, it is impossible to separate the right to the city from the human right to water. WHERE IS URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY? It is evident from the above discussion that it is quite possible to conceptualise the call for the right to the city from the writings of a French philosopher just as it is by starting from the practices of urban planners and activists in Brazil. As we set out in Chapter 1, our aim in this book is to introduce political ecology by going beyond the established Anglo- American canon, at least in part, and to demonstrate that there is no one way of doing political ecology. To the contrary, the field must be situated in a wide range of contexts and be open to a range of voices. To this end, we can also learn from recent attempts in urban political ecology to theorise about human-environment relations from specific locations. While urban political ecologists have tended to focus on experiences in the global north perhaps more strongly than others, Simone’s writings on African cities provide one instance of how a Eurocentric gaze can be displaced and non-Western experiences be sources of hope and potential. Others, such as Mary Lawhon et al. (2014) call for a “situated urban political ecology” and make a case for developing insights from the lived realities of cities in the global south. This argument in itself bears evidence to where most scholars in the subfield find themselves. By “situated”, Lawhon et al. mean in situ, paying close attention to the historical and geographical specificities that make up urban environments. But they also mean “situated” as in Donna Haraway’s (1991) attempt to recognise that knowledge always is located and partial—there is a no single disembodied gaze from which an objective view on reality might be gained. For Nik Heynen (2014), who is one of the best-known contributors to urban political ecology, situated urban political ecology represents a second wave of research in the subfield. He distinguishes this wave from earlier work, including some of his own, which was largely influenced by Marxist theory. Instead, he notes, current scholarship is developing grounded, empirically rich interpretations that make it possible to theorise from the ground up. Heynen Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. focuses particular attention on research concerning race and the city, such as that emerging from the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson 1983). Ranging from the work on racialised envi- ronmental injustices in the United States (Bullard 1990) (Chapter 3) to more recent insights on the relations between caste, racialisation and urban environmental inequalities in India and South Africa (Chari 2021; Ranganathan 2022), some of the most cutting-edge research in urban political ecology is now focused on such themes. In an apparent echo of Heynen’s identification of two waves, and in reference to discus- sions of “planetary urbanisation”, Gandy (2022b: 34) has recently suggested that urban political ecology faces a crucial choice between a renewed political impetus or gradual marginalisation: “Perhaps the prefix ‘urban’ is no longer needed, since the field has come full circle, under an extended characterization of the urban, back to its empirical roots in political ecology, so that the question is one of the limits (or opportunities) for neo-Marxian contributions to Cederlöf, Gustav, and Alex Loftus. Discovering Political Ecology